Why are TED talks 18 minutes long (or less)?
31st December 2011
My answer to Why are TED talks 18 minutes long (or less)? on Quora
I imagine it’s because enforcing a shorter talk time results in consistently higher quality presentations, by forcing speakers to carefully structure their talk and strip out any unnecessary details.
A similar logic holds for five minute “lightning talks”, which are extremely popular at technical conferences. Only having 5 minutes forces people to get straight to the point and stay there.
More recent articles
- Weeknotes: more datasette-secrets, plus a mystery video project - 7th May 2024
- Weeknotes: Llama 3, AI for Data Journalism, llm-evals and datasette-secrets - 23rd April 2024
- Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM - 22nd April 2024
- AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now - 17th April 2024
- Three major LLM releases in 24 hours (plus weeknotes) - 10th April 2024
- Building files-to-prompt entirely using Claude 3 Opus - 8th April 2024
- Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser - 30th March 2024
- llm cmd undo last git commit - a new plugin for LLM - 26th March 2024
- Building and testing C extensions for SQLite with ChatGPT Code Interpreter - 23rd March 2024
- Claude and ChatGPT for ad-hoc sidequests - 22nd March 2024